


need a cosign for your health

by mermycat



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: M/M, Post War, and stuff, things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-19
Updated: 2017-04-19
Packaged: 2018-10-20 18:41:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10668537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mermycat/pseuds/mermycat
Summary: This is short and a mess, but I blasted through Andromeda recently and feeling nostalgic I replayed all three Mass Effect games, became emotional, and this happened.Thank you for reading :)





	need a cosign for your health

The Citadel fell into the Earth. The Reapers fell first; into buildings, roadways, and bodies of water. An electric pulse preceded it all, knocked out communication, extranet, elevators, medical equipment – the last one being problematic, because at about the time that you were found waist-deep in concrete, you’d already lost a good pint of blood. The list was stupidly impressive; one punctured lung, too many ribs broken, a hole in your stomach, a hole in your shoulder, and the synthetics that Cerberus had laid like snare-wire through your system that popped. That was the non-technical jargon. ‘Popped’. Burst. Got triggered in that electric pulse, and so you woke up unable to open your eyes, think in straight lines, or control the fine motor movements of your left hand. 

Not so bad. You’re breathing. Kaidan holds onto your hand too tight, and he tries to tell you that he’ll be your left hand from now on with some humor, but it’s thin against the obvious lick of grief in his voice. That’s not so bad, either. Shit, you like it, and you’ll admit to it. 

You’ll tell him sometime all about it, about being up there in all that milky way black and dying with your cheek against the cold Citadel floor, and how you’d been so hungry it was more like starving, insatiable – how you’d wanted him there with you even if it meant that he was dying, too.

Kaidan would appreciate it. You know this. It’s what he said, pushing his thumb against the vein in the ditch of your elbow, the one they couldn’t get anything out of or into because it’d collapsed at some point. 

He said, “I told you not to leave me behind.” 

“Can’t do shit about it now,” you said, and you smiled. “It worked out all right.” 

“Miraculously.” 

You shrugged. Tried too. Couldn’t really do it. “It’s some kind of miracle that I wasn’t as synthetic as I thought.” 

“Shepard …” Kaidan breathed heavy, squeezed your arm. 

“I imagine the ‘popping’ would ‘a been a lot worse, in that case.” 

“Fucks sake, Shepard,” and he laughed. You laughed, short and dry against the backs of your teeth. Felt good. The kind of laughter that sat in the gut, the kind that anxious people couldn’t make, only mimic. 

As of right now, it’s still half and half. You’re out of the disgustingly deep end of worry; you’re in the clear, absolutely; Earth feels empty and quiet, it’s so clear; but your brain holds onto it’s sense of alarm that kept you company for the last three years. You don’t know if you should put it down to the broken parts of your operating system, or if it’s one of those stress symptoms that come post trauma. A lingering sensation of a monstrosity hanging off the galaxies lip keeps your nerves on edge, and Kaidan’s presence makes it all feel golden, and you can’t quite split the difference – you just think it’ll be something that comes with time. 

Which, you have a lot of now. You have all of it. You have a right deluge of time. 

More than it felt like a month ago, before everything fell in on each other in your most catastrophic victory, when you took Kaidan to a spot on the Citadel where you could help him drink until you felt next to nothing but the music in the base of your skull. In that moment, time existed as a loss. It was a point of pressure in the back of your throat, a strained muscle in your arms, an exhaustion every time you held him because you’d tried, honestly you’d tried so hard, but it wasn’t enough still. Weeks wasn’t enough. Decades wouldn’t have been enough. Those were your last days and you’d wasted them running around trying to solve a problem that didn’t have an easy fix, and you felt it, you felt the absolute dissatisfaction of coming to the end of a long list of regrets, of holding him down and kissing him against a couch in a crowded nightclub and understanding that you would never get to know him any better than you did in that moment.

You thought. 

You really, really thought. 

You woke up, feeling outside of any corporal form or solid space, and you thought of being on the other side of death, the side you’d never fully reached before. 

You thought about Kaidan when he said that you were real enough, and you felt his weight against you, and you thought that real enough wasn’t enough, was it, couldn’t be, but that maybe they could reconstruct something closely resembling the original.

You thought it was a past-life experience. A dream. That you failed. That on the surface those great monstrosities were still reaping life and sowing the ground for those who would come next. You tell Kaidan to pinch you, squeeze your hand until it hurt, prick your thumb with a needle, when they tell you that the Citadel fell into the Earth. 

Instead, he said, “how about you and me go see it, and I’ll describe it to you Shepard.” 

And you said, with a smile, “sure, and I’ll tell you all about how I brought the thing down.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is short and a mess, but I blasted through Andromeda recently and feeling nostalgic I replayed all three Mass Effect games, became emotional, and this happened. 
> 
> Thank you for reading :)


End file.
